Welcome to Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, March 2, 2025, and National Banana Cream Pie Day. Wikipedia has an article on it with tasty photos:
It’s a thin day for holidays, but there’s an important one: International Rescue Cat Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Now that Zelensky has been publicly and harshly had his tuchas smacked down by Trump and Vance, and then kicked out of the White House, what will he do now? He left without the mineral-rights deal Trump wanted, and, I think, Trump came off looking like a narcissistic bully, which is what he is. Ukraine demands security rights (i.e., someone to guarantee that Russia won’t attack again and take more land), but Europe can’t provide that in the way that the U.S. can. Zelensky is in a dilemma, but doesn’t deserve the crap he had to take from Trump. The NYT analyzes the situation (article archived here):
After President Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous meeting with President Trump in the White House on Friday, many Ukrainians were moving toward a conclusion that seemed perfectly clear: Mr. Trump has chosen a side, and it is not Ukraine’s.
In one jaw-dropping meeting, the once unthinkable fear that Ukraine would be forced to engage in a long war against a stronger opponent without U.S. support appeared to move exponentially closer to reality.
“For Ukraine, it is clarifying, though not in a great way,” Phillips O’Brien, an international relations professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said in an interview. “Ukraine can now only count on European states for the support it needs to fight.”
An immediate result was that Ukrainians, including opposition politicians, were generally supportive of Mr. Zelensky on Saturday for not bending to Mr. Trump despite tremendous pressure.
Mr. Zelensky signaled on Saturday that he had not completely given up hope of repairing the relationship with Mr. Trump. Posting on social media, he went out of his way to thank the United States, perhaps trying to address Mr. Trump’s complaint on Friday that he was ungrateful.
“I’m thankful to President Trump, Congress for their bipartisan support, and American people,” he wrote. “Ukrainians have always appreciated this support, especially during these three years of full-scale invasion.”
At the same time, Mr. Zelensky began laying the groundwork for moving ahead with the European countries that have stood by Kyiv’s side. Ukraine announced plans on Saturday for a joint weapons venture with France that would be financed by the interest earned from frozen Russian assets.
Later in the day, Mr. Zelensky met with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, who has been a supporter of the Ukrainian president in the face of Mr. Trump’s harsh rebukes. On Sunday, Mr. Zelensky will attend a summit of European leaders hosted by Mr. Starmer.
The real affront that prompted the spectacle, many Ukrainians and analysts believe, is that Mr. Zelensky pushed back against some of Mr. Trump’s terms.
Along the front lines, some soldiers said that the realization was sinking in that Mr. Trump would probably not help Ukraine. “Trump chose his side in this war,” said Pvt. Serhiy Hnezdilov in a telephone interview from the front on Saturday.
It’s sad that European leaders are now supporting Zelensky while Trump supports the autocrat Putin, creating a rift between us and our European allies. And there’s no chance of NATO providing security guarantees, because the U.S. would have to approve that, and it won’t. It sucks to be Zelensky now, but I admire him a lot.
*When we look back on this era from the remove of a few decades, we’ll see that sex and gender extremism had deeply corrupted liberals, leading to distrust of Democrats. That, at least, is the conclusion reached in this new Boston Globe column, “A new low for free speech: Democrats strip voting rights from Maine state representative over post on trans athletes.” The subtitle is “Democrats can’t win the argument and know they’re out of step with public opinion. So they seem intent on silencing their opponents instead.” (h/t Jez)
Democrats fancy themselves the party that fights for women.But on Tuesday, Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat, led the charge to take the vote away from one.
House Democrats voted, 75-70, to censure state Representative Laurel Libby, a Republican, and strip her of her vote and, by extension, her constituents of their representation in the Legislature until she apologizes for a Facebook post she made about a transgender student winning a girls high school track meet.
Her Feb. 17 post includes two pictures: one, from two years ago, that showed a male student standing on the fifth-place podium at a track meet; the other was from last week and showed the same student on the first-place podium, standing next to two girls with their faces blurred. The face of the transgender student — a minor — is shown clearly.
And this is where I pulled up. If the transgender student is a minor, it’s not kosher to show their picture, and, indeed, that’s why Libby was formally censured.
Whether it’s fair for transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports is something Libby could theoretically vote on in the Maine Legislature. While she could have made her point without a picture, she’s entitled to her opinion — and her constituents are entitled to hear it.
But in a scene that almost felt like satire, Fecteau gazed down from his lectern at Libby, mother of five, after she gave a speech about the importance of protecting girls’ sports ahead of the vote to censure her.
Or tried to give a speech. Over the course of about 10 minutes, Libby tried to explain herself, only to be interrupted mostly by Democratic men. “The member is beginning to skate on thin ice, as it relates to the course of debate in this chamber,” Fecteau told her from on high — after yet another interruption. Libby managed to get through less than one page of her seven-page floor speech.
Libby’s choice to depict a minor in a post was bound to draw criticism. Perhaps the inclusion of the photo was even unnecessary, with a national consensus on her side when it comes to the question of transgender athletes participating in girls’ sports. But she didn’t break any laws, and, as she has pointed out, public photos of the student had circulated widely before she posted about the track meet.
Nonetheless, instead of disagreeing with her, or debating with her, the Maine House moved to take away her vote, a sanction that should be reserved for politicians who commit only the most serious crimes related to corruption or public integrity. The punishment, on a party line vote, is vastly out of proportion to the supposed sin.
It’s a move that only underlines the illiberalism that’s associated with a progressive movement that refuses to see how certain instances of transgender participation in sports compromise the safety and fairness of girls’ athletics. A movement that has opted for shouting down dissent instead of debating their position.
Apparently, until she apologizes, which Libby has no intention of doing, she will not longer be entitled to speak or vote in the Maine House. Thus, it’s not just censuring but censorship. That is far too strict a punishment for something that, after all, is legal. One gets the feeling that the severity of the punishment—the vote was along party lines—is out of line with the magnitude of the transgression. And you know why: it’s blasphemy for a Democrat to suggest that trans-identified males should not compete in women’s sports. (Libby’s Twitter series that got her in trouble is here.)
*In his Weekly Dish post, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative, finds some solace from “The other resistance—on the Right.” His piece launches from the opprobrium that the Republican Tate brothers, indicted in Romania for sexual violence (but allowed to leave that country), are receiving from fellow Republicans.
Andrew Tate explained why he held out hope they could soon return to abusing women in the US:
The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back. And they will be better than ever.
I mention this not because I’m shocked. The two most prominent men in the Trump administration, after all, have either regularly “grabbed women by the pussy” or sired 13 kids from four different mothers — and evangelicals love them all the more. So of course, the Tates are beloved by Candace Owens, Benny Johnson, Richard Grenell, among other MAGA luminaries.
I mention it solely because some on the right actually don’t like the Tates at all. Ben Shapiro has fumed: “The right should DUMP Andrew Tate.” Chris Rufo called him “a common pimp with social media following.” Washington Examiner’s Kimberly Ross thundered: “The Left and Right don’t agree on much. But when it comes to a misogynistic predator such as Tate, we can agree on this: We don’t need more like him.” Senator Josh Hawley just said, “I don’t think conservatives should be glorifying this guy at all.” Super-rightist Pedro Gonzalez agreed: “Andrew Tate is a scumbag. Whatever cultural forces propelled his rise, Trumpworld’s embrace of him is disgusting and wrong.” And yesterday, Ron DeSantis told the Tates they weren’t welcome in Florida.
I know this is not exactly a big ask: distancing from alleged rapists and human traffickers. But in the current cult-like climate, as the Trump peeps repeatedly huff their own methane, and the crazies appear to be pushing on countless open doors, it’s something. (I wish there had been similar liberal call-outs of left-extremists under Biden at the very start.) And it’s not the only sign of internal, conservative resistance to a reactionary, lawless populism.
. . .So let us now praise National Review, whose writers Ed Whelan, Andrew McCarthy, Charles CW Cooke, and executive editor Mark Antonio Wright have consistently called out Trump’s rhetorical assaults on core American values. [JAC: where’s Bret Stephens?] Substacker Richard Hanania has been on a roll as well, decrying the dumbness of the Muskovites: “Coming around to the idea that it’s all just stupidity. I can’t think of any obvious or 4d chess reason why you would stop funding biomedical research.” Me neither.
Among veterans on this lonely path: Jonah Goldberg, George Will, David Brooks, and David French (the latter somewhat defanged by being coopted as the NYT’s darling). And let’s also note Jack Goldsmith’s erudite deconstructions of Trump’s violations of even unitary executive theory, rightly understood.
. . . Other conservatives have been decrying the “woke right,” by which they mean those so caught up in their far-right bubble that they risk jeopardizing the entire project of restraining the left. Two honorable mentions: Bari Weiss’ speech at the ARC conference in London, raising alarm about Tate-like excesses; and James Lindsay, a constant wild card, who nonetheless sees the same groupthink, cultish behavior, and intolerance on the right that we saw on the woke left under Biden. Here’s Lindsay, for example, on Bannon’s kinda-Nazi salute:
Bari Weiss is not what I’d consider a conservative, though I don’t know where Lindsay places himself on the political spectrum (no, it’s not binary). A bit more:
The WSJ, the highest quality right-of-center paper, has also been airing dissent on a regular, intelligent basis. Today alone, in a Trump symposium, you’ll find one regular columnist decrying the chaos of Musk’s appointment, another worrying about Trump’s military designs on Panama, another that, “under this administration, for better or worse, it’s not clear there is a script,” and another that the administration is opening “the Overton window in ways good and bad.” The paper openly campaigns against Trump’s tariffs. Its chief political columnist, Kimberley Strassel, wrote this week:
Trump, through his own narcissism and stupidity, is destroying whatever coalition he forged in November. Sullivan sees this as a watershed time for the GOP:
But this is the very beginning of the second-term roller-coaster ride, the moment when all doubts are supposed to be set aside by the faithful exulting in the honeymoon. And these small acts of conservative defiance matter. They are putting on record all of Trump’s overreach, in a manner unknown among dissident Democrats when Biden began his woke Kulturkampf. They keep the conservative tradition alive, even as most of the GOP abandons it in favor of strongman, tech-bro authoritarianism. That’s something. And when in the future we begin to undo the madness of this moment, it will, unlike Trump’s derangement, age remarkably well.
*The oldest living Holocaust survivor has died at 113 (see also here; h/t Jez and Frau Katze). And Rose Girone has her own Wikipedia page. From the Guardian first:
Rose Girone, believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor and a strong advocate for sharing survivors’ stories, has died. She was 113.
She died on Monday in New York, accrding to the Claims Conference, a New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
“She just was a terrific lady,” her daughter, Reha Benicassa, said by phone on Friday. “Nothing was too hard. She wasn’t fearful. She was an adventurous person. She did well.”
Girone was born on 13 January 1912 in Janow, Poland. Her family moved to Hamburg, Germany, when she was six, she said in a filmed interview in 1996 with the USC Shoah Foundation.
When asked by the interviewer if she had any particular career plans before Adolf Hitler, she said that he “came in 1933 and then it was over for everybody”.
Girone was one of about 245,000 survivors still living across more than 90 countries, according to a study released by the Claims Conference last year. Their numbers are quickly dwindling, as most are very old and often of frail health, with a median age of 86.
From the NYT:
Rose Girone was eight months pregnant and living in Breslau, Germany, in 1938 when her husband was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She secured passage to Shanghai, only to be forced to live in a bathroom in a Jewish ghetto for seven years. Once settled in the United States, she rented whatever she could find while supporting her daughter with knitting.
Despite the hardships, including two pandemics, Ms. Girone embraced life with urgent positivity and common sense. “Aren’t we lucky?” she would often say.
Ms. Girone was believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust. She died at a nursing home in North Bellmore, N.Y., on Long Island, on Monday, her daughter and fellow survivor, Reha Bennicasa, said. She was 113.
Her secret to longevity was simple, she would say: dark chocolate and good children.
“Holocaust survivor” clearly means not somebody who survived a concentration camp (though we have some of them), but any Jew who lived through the period and lived in a country controlled by Nazis. I wonder if I’ll be alive when the last one dies (this won’t be too far from the last solder in WWII dying, either).
Here’s Rose Girone, a screenshot from The Algemeiner (a screenshot):
*Finally, let’s end the weekend by saying, as they say on NBC News, “there’s GOOD NEWS tonight.” This time it’s the rescue of a horse who fell through the ice into a freezing New York pond.
A horse that fell through the ice of an upstate New York pond was saved by rescuers who pulled together to free the animal from the frigid water.
Body-camera footage from responding officers shows the team of Saratoga Springs police and neighbors grunting and straining to pull Sly, a 1,300 pound (590 kilogram) horse, from a hole in the ice late Monday afternoon. Sly can be seen flailing his front legs while rescuers shout “One, two three, pull!” and “C’mon, baby. We got ya!”
Sly’s owner, Ali Ernst, said she noticed her three horses playing on the pond when she came home from work, which was not uncommon. But when she looked out again, the 22-year-old quarter horse had fallen through the ice.
Ernst made a series of calls for help as she ran to the hole in the ice, grabbed Sly’s halter to keep his head up and waited for help.
AP correspondent Julie Walker reports on two separate dramatic ice rescues in New York of a man and a horse.
“I was losing the battle to keep him above water alone,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Officer Kyle Clinton arrived first and helped Ernst get Sly’s full head back up on the ice. They were soon joined by others, including two more officers, neighbors and family members.
Here’s the video. It reminds me of the old Jewish saying, “If you save one life, it’s as if you saved the world entire.” And they did—for this horse. I never accepted the “ACAB” slogan, and this shows that it’s false.
Click on the “watch on YouTube” link.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a good question:
Hili: I have a question.A: What question?Hili: Who is manufacturing the moral compasses?
Hili: Mam pytanie.Ja: Jakie?Hili: Kto produkuje busole moralne?
And a photo of the loving Szaron:
And from Berlin, Stupsi has a few words upon seeing a spider:
Stupsi: “Es ist wieder kalt draußen. Dort sind wir von Feinden umgeben. Siehst Du meine neuen Freunde hier? Diese Spinnen sind Vorboten des Frühlings und sie geben mir Hoffnung.” (Translation: “It is cold outside. We are surrounded by enemies. Can you see my new friends here? These spiders are messengers of spring and they give me something to look forward to.”)
*******************
From Things With Faces, a sleepy eggplant:
From My Cat is an Asshole:
From The Dodo:
From Masih, another Iranian woman jailed for . . . SINGING:
Jailed for… singing?! The Iranian regime is beyond parody. Every woman has the right to sing, speak, and be free.
Bita Sadeghian faces charges of “violating public morality” and “disseminating inappropriate content online.”Summoning a woman for singing is not about… pic.twitter.com/gjSBSdtPP7
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) March 1, 2025
From Luana. I’ll try to report on this paper within a day or two:
Huge new study involving 107, 583 patients with gender dysphoria: “Those undergoing [gender-affirming] surgery were at significantly higher risk for depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance use disorders than those without surgery.”https://t.co/lxHcXEAAtA
— i/o (@eyeslasho) February 28, 2025
From Bryan, who says “… I’m simply captured by this performance. I have been singing it in my head the past week! I gather – unexpectedly – that Just The Two Of Us on ukelele is a fad. I have not looked into that. I bet the clip you shared of McCartney on ukelele factors in the machine-learning that brought this up.”
Part 2 pic.twitter.com/SSViK20QnH
— Gus McGillicutty (@defnotUGAfan) February 27, 2025
From Malcolm, a fearless moggy:
This fearless cat
pic.twitter.com/SrPeQ1Dppz— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) January 24, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted,
2 March 1925 | A Polish Jewish girl, Jeannette Woda, was born in Siedlce. She lived in Paris.On 13 July 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz. She did not survive.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-03-02T03:00:13.819Z
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first is from the Onion:
FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States
And it looks like most cats engage in ronronning:
The purr article on French Wikipedia has a chart that sorts cats into the groups "purrs," "uncertain," "probably purrs," and "no data"
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-02-05T04:29:59.688Z
“…it’s blasphemy for a Democrat to suggest that trans-identified males should compete in women’s sports.”
Shouldn’t that be “should NOT compete” ?
Yes, it was an error and I’ve fixed it; thanks.
[ 1 ]
“… standing next to two girls with their faces blurred. The face of the transgender student — a minor — is shown clearly.”
Every child has a parental waiver of some nature signed for use of photography to support whatever the activity is – pottery, athletics, camping, cricket. It is rare that a face would be blurred out.
Most cases I think the waiver is just signed because what are the parents going to do – reject the waiver, the kid gets blurred out, and then the kid asks why they are blurred out, and they are in a pickle.
But then what matters is the waiver – was it signed?
[ 2 ]
Thanks for finding the second part of the guy singing Just The Two Of Us. I checked if it was AI and it’s not, so I’m glad! And now it’s in my head again…
I agree with the waiver idea. Young athletes are often photographed for local news features.
While I wouldn’t have been comfortable using the photos, I wonder how concerned the legislators would’ve been about privacy if the photos were posted, unblurred, with the caption “Maine Supports Trans Kids!🏳️⚧️”
And the ukulele piece was great! I really like the guy’s voice.
I don’t understand the kerfuffle over the face non-blurring.
There is no expectation of privacy in a public place. No one commits an offence simply by taking ordinary photos of contestants or spectators at an athletic competition, even of minors with faces visible, and posting them on the internet or publishing them in the newspaper without getting consent.
Where the waiver comes in is if the school wanted to use its photographer’s photos of the event to promote the school’s athletic program. To avoid mercantile complaints, the school would want the parents to know that it would be photographing participants and publishing photos with possibly identifiable faces. The waiver could, I suppose, promise to blur the face of a specific child if the parent so indicated on the waiver she signed. (I would be surprised to learn that any schools would undertake the high-risk effort to do this accurately, but these days…) But the waiver can’t bind the parents or general public from taking whatever photos they want and doing whatever they want with them.
Was it mean-spirited, even if not illegal, for Rep. Libby to show the face of the boy on the girls’ podium? To me, only if no one knew already that he was really a boy and the senator’s use of his photo outed him as one. But this is absurd. The narrative is these boys are celebrated for their “courage” in being the first transgender girls to win this or that event, or for “shattering” records, or improving from fifth to first in a single season! He (and his followers) wear their trans-ness on their sleeves as a badge of honour. They crave the publicity. Well, he got it.
And even if she had blurred his face, surely everyone remotely connected with the event knew exactly who he was. I think the Emperor in the Maine House was just looking for an excuse to silence the little girl who called out that his tailors had swindled him.
Clearly – as the saying goes – it’s complicated
BUT
Allow me to rant – I despise these %#*$ waivers. It’s a whole other mess – and it is a mess. Want your kid’s photo if they win? On the team? Well – what then? You have to decide by the fine print when you sign up. No? Then no photos for you.
I don’t have all day to monitor all online or other use of photos or check if they were deleted or worse etc. I just want kids to get the most out of great opportunities.
/rant
Suggested reading:
The Commissar Vanishes – The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia
David King
Canongate Books Ltd (United Kingdom)
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt (United States)
1997
At the age of fourteen I won a cross-country race, and a photo of me and the 2nd and 3rd finishers was published in the local newspaper. Nobody thought anything of it.
Totally Leslie.
I’m 100% on this as an attorney.
If you do anything in public… it is public record. Let alone bigging up your sports achievements! Totally fair game.
This blurring out trend – “It’s muh priiivacy!” bs doesn’t comport with either law or living in an open society. It might not be ideal that things in the past (picking one’s nose in a car, say) are open season for viewers now… for sure. Not ideal.
But that is our society – its laws and norms – and anything you do outside your home – at any age – is fair game. Always has been, irrespective of the fact we have better tools to memorialize stuff these days.
D.A.
NYC
Thanks (Bryan) for the ukulele piece. A much needed bit of joy and I agree with Susan (below) that the performer had a great voice. He’s so unabashedly happy which makes it even better.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
We have come to a point where it is loyalty to resist, and treason to submit. -Carl Schurz, revolutionary, statesman, and reformer (2 Mar 1829-1906)
Very good!
“Now is the season/When logic and reason/Are looked on as treason.”-Peter Schickele aka P.D.Q. Bach “The Stoned Guest”
P.S. The eggplant looks like Nixon.
Carl Schurz was also an immigrant, and a U.S. Senator (a Republican, back when that meant something good), who famously said “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right”, to thunderous applause, on the Senate floor.
“And there’s no chance of NATO providing security guarantees,”
NATO is dead. There’s no chance if it doing anything at this point. I don’t think anyone now believes the US would defend, say, Poland if Russia attacked it next.
So on the hypothetical that a consortium of European countries will enter Ukraine as a peace-keeping force, will they have to be non-NATO units and equipment?
I’m pretty sure that each country in NATO can deploy its armed forces independently of NATO, if it so chooses. The British Army doesn’t have a NATO Regiment, just regiments that could, if called upon, be deployed as part of a NATO force. Likewise with the other European members of NATO.
As an example, the U.S. and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t there as NATO units.
They were there in Afghanistan under NATO auspices (Article 5 having been triggered by the United States after 9/11) with the blessing of the United Nations. Each country decided what its own military response and contribution was going to be. The force that was ponied up being multinational, at some point up the chain of command, a Canadian (say) soldier’s brigade commander was going to be taking operational orders from an in-theatre divisional commander from another country’s military (in our case the United States), not from a major-general back home in Canada or in NATO HQ in Brussels. But the task and purpose of the Canadian contingent lay with the senior command structure in our Dept. of National Defence under civilian control.
Only in that sense of organizing the contributed forces of several countries into one ad hoc operational command is there such a thing as a “NATO force.”
If European soldiers were going to be deployed to Ukraine after a cease-fire they could absolutely not be seen to be a NATO Force because that would tell Russia that Ukraine had secretly joined NATO and had invoked Article 5.
(Iraq was a coalition of the willing. NATO wasn’t involved because no signatory had been attacked by Iraq.)
I’m not sure what you mean. NATO isn’t an army, it’s a mutual defence pact between countries. “If you’re attacked, I’ll defend you; if I’m attacked, you’ll defend me”. NATO members can deploy their militaries for other reasons too if they want to. There are no NATO-only units or equipment.
Since Ukraine is not a NATO member, Western support for it is not being conducted through NATO. On the other hand Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Finland etc are all NATO members so if Russia attacked one of them all of NATO would in theory be required to help defend them. But many people now doubt America would actually honour that commitment, including Germany’s new chancellor who has said as much in public.
I just had to look up the good looking birds in The Fearless Cat video. Unless I’m mistaken they are Florida’s Crested Caracaras.
I’m again reminded that “terror birds” once ruled the earth.
I feel so bad for Zelensky. He speaks English well, but not natively, so he was at an unfair disadvantage when Trump and Vance started berating him. And when Zelensky said that he would wear a “costume” after the war is over, he was misinterpreted. In Ukrainian “костюм” is a tailored suit. Zelensky was not mocking his hosts.
Defending his country and getting no help from the United States must make Zelensky feel like the loneliest man in the world.
I agree about the “costume” remark. I’ve made that argument to a few people that this is Zelensky’s second language and it’s really hard to manage when you aren’t native level fluency in a situation like this. A word like “costume” would easily be misapplied and anyone exposed to discussions not in one’s native language would recognize this as a strong possibility. He did amazingly well give then disadvantage he was in and with absolutely no charity toward him, language or otherwise.
It’s costume (kostym) in Swedish, too.
Nevertheless, if Zelenskyy had meant it in a mocking way, that would be fine too.
A successful lunar landing by a private company!
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/private-lunar-lander-blue-ghost-touches-moon-special-119339262
People forget that it was Trump who sent the Javelin missiles to Ukraine after Obama refused to do this. It was the Javelins that allowed Ukraine to stop the Russian tanks in the early days of the war.
True my friend Lysander – but remember at the time Russian expansionism wasn’t widely understood as the threat it became (although Georgians will disagree).
Context and time is important.
With the benefit of hindsight I’d hope Obama would have come to Ukraine’s aid sooner.
D.A.
NYC
The USA, under Clinton, had bullied Ukraine into giving up its nuclear arsenal – to Russia of all countries, which had committed genocide against Ukrainians before – and in return, promised to defend its territorial integrity (the Budapest Memorandum).
I don’t understand why Obama decided that the signature of the US President meant nothing, and Putin should have Ukraine if he wanted it so much. I suppose that this just reflects Obama’s values. Or maybe his giant ego didn’t allow him to admit that Romney, whom he mocked for saying that Russia was a major threat, had been right all along.
I didn’t know why the Dems (and the left in general elsewhere) are so determined to permit men to compete in women’s sports.
One argument I see is that it’s not very common. They’ll also dredge up cases where the male didn’t win.
The women who lost? Apparently they don’t matter. They need to suck it up to help the man feel better about himself.
Women don’t matter.
Not to some leftist women, either, it seems from Peter’s reply below.
Somebody’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.
This week I was listening to this:
Reality vs. Trans Ideology | Peter Boghossian interviews Helen Joyce, July 3, 2023, 70 mins – On YouTube
@ 57:05 mins, Boghossian plays a video clip showing journalist Emma Vigeland saying the following on The Majority Report, a left-wing, progressive internet talk radio program and podcast (and she’s not keeping her cool):
So the idea here is that transgender people have been/are this suffering minority (presumably because they are believed to have been born in the wrong body), and because of that all their demands must be met in full. That means, society has to be re-organized for their maximum ease and comfort, irrespective of how that affects the interests of any other social group. So, for instance, the theater piece “The Vagina Monologues” cannot be staged on International Women’s Day because some women are claimed not to have a vagina (namely, pre-operative transidentified males) – I’m not making this up (this happened on some liberal college campus).
For the Democratic party, which aspires to win elections, to keep this as part of their party platform is risky, if not insane. But is it anymore insane than defunding the police, decriminalizing petty crime, open borders, prison abolition, dissing free speech?
It seems that the Dems strategy now is to hope that Trump overreaches, and then to focus on economic issues, while pretending that cultural issues don’t matter. Of course, in a democracy no party can dictate to voters what issues they should care about. It seems to me that this is only a minimal change of strategy: Instead of making themselves significantly more attractive in the eyes of voters (okay, we can assume that they won’t create an open border situation again soon), the Dems hope that Trump trips himself up. Let’s remember that Trump would have been likely re-elected in 2020 if there had not been a pandemic (if he had handled it better).
The capacity of humans to delude themselves is nothing new, but it nevertheless is disheartening.
I find it thought-provoking that we inheritors of the 20,000+ human generations of survivors of a wide range of adverse conditions can be such screwups.
“[S]ociety has to be re-organized for their maximum ease and comfort, irrespective of how that affects the interests of any other social group.”
As is often the case, there’s a “Family Guy” episode for that.
https://x.com/OkayBiology/status/1857875492038160711
I can only imagine Emma leading the column to take a witch to burn on a hill – a la Wicker Man. She is an aesthetically beautiful hard core woke maniac fanatic — and strangely hypnotic.
Of course she’d take the hardest Trans activist line.
D.A.
NYC
edit: ack, this was supposed to be a reply to David Harper, further up the thread. Any chance OGH could move it?
America’s allies went into Afghanistan as part of NATO because 9/11 was seen as an attack on America, so it triggered the mutual-defence clause (for the first time ever).
They didn’t go into Iraq as part of NATO. Iraq did not attack America so the mutual defence clause didn’t apply. They went in willingly, they were not bound to do so by a treaty. Hence the phrase “coalition of the willing” that was bandied about at the time.
I wonder how much Dubya’s “If you’re not for us, you’re against us” influenced their participation.
Why on earth is the horse-rescue video age-appropriate embargoed?
(Also, it looked like he was pretty close to shore. Why not just break the ice and let him walk out?)
What is wrong with Maine? From California, Canada, and New Zealand, I would expect TRA extremism. However, Maine? Maine does have a TRA governor (Mills). Maine does have all sorts of fanatics (based on Christy Hammer’s travails, she is a signer of your letter). Maine has expelled a legislator for daring to oppose cheating in High School sports.
Is the “expelled” legislator the “censored” legislator, or a different legislator?
This Maine situation seems quite autocratic here in the Land of the Democratic Ideal. Seems like the U.S. has quite enough domestic (as opposed to foreign) autocracy with which to deal. I wonder if the Maine legislature Democrats are relieved that it was a Republican female and not one of their own female Democrats who posted the photo and expressed the same sentiments. It would surely greatly stress them out to contemplate censuring her.
I wonder if the NY Times editorial board has a consensus position on this incident, in that the board very recently (and most properly and correctly) condemned the Trump regime for its hypocritical censorship. I anticipate that FIRE will jump on this “like a duck on a June Bug.” Surely any citizen in the representative’s district has “standing” to file a lawsuit against Maine.
If the Maine legislature can thusly censure a state representative (and by extension citizens in her district), can it not similarly directly censure any Maine voter for thusly posting?
“Expelled” is too strong a word. Libby has not be expelled. However, “censored” isn’t right either. Libby has been denied her right to vote. Had she merely been “censored” the word might be appropriate.
Andrew Sullivan brings up an issue that I’ve noticed for a long time – the right leaning media is more diverse in terms of opinion than the left.
Note: this is not always true, just as all men are not taller than all women; I’m noting it as a general rule.
Criticism of Trump and Musk gets aired much more frequently on right media than any criticism of Biden and his team ever did from center and left media. I can get my dose of left media by reading a single article from any of the major news sources, as they all are the same but with some minor wording details (so many use the exact same phrasing from the original press release), whereas I enjoy bouncing around the right media outlets to get a variety of takes on issues. I do like to read some of the leftist fringe opinions that will surface on Mother Jones or Jacobin, but those voices seem to be held down by the conventional left media.